{"id":46884,"date":"2016-05-09T01:33:35","date_gmt":"2016-05-09T01:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46884"},"modified":"2016-05-10T00:20:17","modified_gmt":"2016-05-10T00:20:17","slug":"jump-at-de-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46884","title":{"rendered":"Jump at de Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jump at de Sun<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Nation<\/a>
\n2003-01-30<\/p>\n

Kristal Brent Zook<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Anthropologist, novelist, folklorist, essayist and luminary of the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>, Zora Neale Hurston<\/a> dazzled her peers and patrons almost immediately upon her arrival in New York City<\/a> in 1925, when she made a show-stopping grand entrance at a formal literary affair, flinging a red scarf around her neck and stopping all conversation with her animated storytelling and antics. \u201cI would like to know her,\u201d declared Langston Hughes<\/a>. She had a \u201cblazing zest for life,\u201d opined celebrity writer Fannie Hurst<\/a>. Annie Nathan Meyer<\/a>, a founder of Barnard College<\/a>, did them one better: She promptly offered Hurston entrance into Columbia University\u2019s sister college, making her the first black student to attend Barnard.<\/p>\n

Over the course of her life, Hurston would publish several dozen essays, short stories and poems, and seven books, including her notoriously deceptive (some would say ingeniously \u201cdissembling\u201d) autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road<\/em>. Nine more books\u2013essays, folklore, short stories and a play\u2013would appear in print posthumously, following Alice Walker\u2019s<\/a> \u201crediscovery\u201d of Hurston in the 1970s. According to Carla Kaplan<\/a>, editor of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters<\/em> and a professor at the University of Southern California, this resurrection of the long-forgotten writer has yielded over 800 more books (including sixteen for children), articles, chapters, dissertations, reference guides and biographical essays about Hurston over the past three decades. That some 2,000 spectators showed up at Central Park<\/a> last summer for a reading of her work is further evidence that Zora mania continues to be in full swing….<\/p>\n

…On the other hand (and herein lies the rub), Hurston also believed that \u201call clumps of people turn out to be individuals on close inspection,\u201d and that \u201cblack skunks are just as natural as white ones.\u201d And she had absolutely no tolerance for the suffering protest narratives such as those offered up by novelist (and nemesis) Richard Wright<\/a>. But \u201ccan the black poet sing a song to the morning?\u201d she demanded in a 1938 essay. No, she laments, answering her own question. \u201cThe one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be chocked back. I will write of a lynching instead.\u201d<\/p>\n

And there are other troubling inconsistencies. Those of us of racially mixed parentage, for example, might wonder whether we would have qualified for Hurston\u2019s affection as \u201cauthentic\u201d black folk. That she placed a premium on \u201cpure\u201d Negroness was apparent in her attacks on colorist prejudice among the light-skinned black elite (W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a> was not well-loved by Hurston for his championing of the talented tenth<\/a>); her disparaging remarks about \u201ca crowd of white Negroes\u201d on their way to Russia to make a movie about black America who had never been \u201csouth of the Mason-Dixon line<\/a>\u201d; and her \u201ccolor-conscious casting\u201d of an \u201cauthentic\u201d Negro concert with \u201cno mulattoes<\/a> at all.\u201d (Godmother Mason was also pleased by this banning of the \u201cdiluted ones.\u201d)<\/p>\n

She was a black nationalist, say some. Indeed, her complicated opposition to Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/a> flew in the face of everything the \u201crace leaders\u201d of her time fought and died for. Though she was not a segregationist, Hurston found the assumption of Negro inferiority deeply insulting, according to both Boyd and Kaplan. \u201cIt is a contradiction,\u201d as Hurston put it, \u201cto scream race pride and equality while\u2026spurning Negro teachers and self-association.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jump at de Sun The Nation 2003-01-30 Kristal Brent Zook Anthropologist, novelist, folklorist, essayist and luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston dazzled her peers and patrons almost immediately upon her arrival in New York City in 1925, when she made a show-stopping grand entrance at a formal literary affair, flinging a red scarf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[20320,2831,150],"class_list":["post-46884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-kristal-brent-zook","tag-the-nation","tag-zora-neale-hurston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46884"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46913,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46884\/revisions\/46913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}